Life in the Ville by Jimmy Del Ponte

It’s summer in Somerville. The year is 1969. Most of my friends are around 16. One or two of the older kids already have their licenses, so four or five lucky kids at a time went off in their dads’ car for the night. The rest of us were left to hang around on the corner of Kidder Ave. and Bay State Ave.

There were usually at least 15-20 boys and girls leaning up against the fence or sitting on the curb. That’s where we met, and spent a lot of time. We were listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin. Our hair was getting long and we wore bellbottom dungarees. Yes, dungarees, not jeans. We also wore army surplus jackets, and desert boots from Thom McCanns. There were no laptops, no Netflix, no cell phones. If idle hands were the hands of the devil, then we were Satan’s devious little workers.

Hanging on the corner and smoking cigarettes, singing under the streetlight and goofing around was what we did almost every night. Almost!

One Sunday morning my mom and dad drove by after church and I had to hide a lit cigarette in my pocket for a whole minute. My pocket briefly caught fire but I didn’t get “bagged.”

We had creative activities to keep us one step ahead of boredom and the cops. They would disperse us from the corner every hour or so but we’d always return.

One of my pals created a game called “running over the roofs of parked cars.” He would jump from one parked car to another running up the trunk, onto the roof, then down the hood to the next car. It was purely reckless, idiotic and destructive. But after a few Budweisers it was quite the athletic event. One day, you guessed it, one of the cars was a convertible! It took three of us to pull him out of the car after he plunged through the ragtop. I hope that guy had insurance. It maybe a little too late but, sorry pal!

Another dumb game we played was going “sign banging.” We’d run from stop sign to stop sign banging it with a stick or preferably a baseball bat. Dumb, but fun and very noisy and annoying. Those poor neighbors.

One of the most creative, messy, enjoyable and crazy things we did was “the Great Potato Chip Incident.” My friends’ mother used to buy in bulk before it was fashionable to buy in bulk. Fast forward to four very bored teenagers on a warm July afternoon. My buddy comes out of his house with four huge bags of Lays potato chips. We ate our fill out of one bag and emptied the other three bags onto the street at the top of Bay State Ave. It’s a pretty decent hill so when the greasy chips were well stomped and ground onto the pavement, it became very slippery. We ran, slipped, fell, and laughed our butts off sliding down the hill on the crushed potato chips. I remember It like it was yesterday. It was definitely a highlight of the summer.

Soon the 70’s came along. Somerfest, Somerville’s program that brought live music to the streets, kept us busy as our band Shadowfax performed concerts on blocked off streets. Our first cars also happened and we were finally and triumphantly out of high school! Yay! A whole new era of piling into a car and driving around all night was born.

There was also another activity that the boys took place in. It was basically trying to meet and hook up with girls. It was called “scooping.” We’d put on our scooping clothes and we’d go out hoping to meet girls. Sliding down the hill on smooshed potato chips was a lot easier!